The Wizard of Oz: the book vs the 1939 movie, and what actually changed

Everyone knows one difference: the shoes were silver. It gets repeated so often that it has stopped meaning anything, which is a shame, because the shoes are the thread you can pull to unravel the whole comparison. Change what the shoes are made of and you have a costume note. Change who gives them to Dorothy, what they can do, and whether anyone tells her, and you have a different story with a different ending.

• ✅Oz is a real place in the book. Nobody wakes up. The last chapter is Dorothy telling her aunt where she has been.
• ✅The shoes are silver, and nobody explains them. Dorothy wears the answer to her own problem for twenty-one chapters.
• ✅The book never says how old Dorothy is. Not once, in twenty-four chapters.
• ✅The story continues after the balloon. The film ends where the book has seven chapters left to run.

It helps to know that the film is not adapting an obscure book. It is adapting the best-selling children's book in America, published in Chicago in 1900, so widely read that most of the 1939 audience would have known the plot before the lights went down. The changes below were made deliberately, to a story everybody already knew, which is what makes them worth looking at.

🌪️ In the book, Oz is a real place

There is no dream frame in the novel. Dorothy is carried away by a cyclone with the house around her, lands in a real country, spends weeks walking across it, and comes home by magical transport at the end. Nobody wakes her. Nobody explains her away. The final chapter is four paragraphs long, and it consists almost entirely of her aunt asking where she has been.

“My darling child!” she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses. “Where in the world did you come from?” “From the Land of Oz,” said Dorothy gravely.

The word doing the work is gravely. She is not fizzing with a story. She reports her location like an adult back from a long trip, and the book ends before anyone can argue with her. That single adverb is the difference between the two versions: Baum's Dorothy has been somewhere, and the film's Dorothy has been asleep.

The dream is not an accident of adaptation, and it has a name attached. Screenwriter Noel Langley's draft dated 4 May 1938, now held by the Smithsonian, already has the frame in place, on the reasoning that a 1939 audience was too sophisticated to take Oz literally. MGM put the film into general release that August. The studio thought grown-ups would not sit still for a real fairy country, and Baum, writing for children in 1900, had assumed they would.

The film's other structural invention follows from the same decision. If Oz is a dream, it needs dream logic, so the people in it have to be assembled from the people Dorothy saw before she fell asleep, and the farmhands come back as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion. It is a genuinely elegant piece of screenwriting, and it is entirely the film's. Baum's three companions are strangers Dorothy meets on a road, each with a private reason for walking it, and none of them reminds her of anyone from home.

Kansas is grey in both, but it is grey in different ways. The film uses sepia because the colour is the point. Baum wrote the greyness as damage: the sun had baked the ploughed land into a grey mass with cracks in it, the grass had burned grey, the paint had blistered off the house, and the same sun and wind had taken the sparkle out of Aunt Em's eyes. The film's Kansas is a palette. The book's Kansas is a place that has been wearing people out.

The playable version starts before any of this: a cyclone on the horizon, and the choice of whether to go down into the cellar or go back for the dog. Role-play The Wonderful Wizard of Oz →

👠 The shoes are silver, and they are a loaded gun

In chapter two Dorothy is shown two feet sticking out from under the corner of her own house, shod in silver shoes with pointed toes. The feet dry up in the sun and vanish. What is left is the footwear, which the good witch who rules the North picks up, shakes the dust out of, and hands over. A Munchkin standing nearby says the only useful thing anyone says about the shoes for the next twenty-one chapters.

“The Witch of the East was proud of those silver shoes,” said one of the Munchkins, “and there is some charm connected with them; but what it is we never knew.”

So Dorothy walks the whole road in them. She walks to the Emerald City in them, is sent to kill a witch in them, is taken prisoner in them, and refuses to give them up. Then, in the second-to-last chapter, Glinda tells her what they do, and the sentence is close to cruel: your silver shoes will carry you over the desert, and if you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.

Everything the girl has been through was optional. That is a hard, strange, adult idea to put at the end of a children's book, and the film cannot use it, because in the film the slippers get explained to Dorothy in the last five minutes as a lesson she had to be ready to learn. Baum offers no such comfort. Nobody withheld the information to teach her anything. The Munchkins genuinely did not know, and the one witch who did was on the other side of the country.

And the shoes do not survive. On the flight home they fall off and are lost forever in the desert, so there is no keepsake, no proof, and nothing to show Aunt Em. The most famous prop in twentieth-century cinema is, in the source, an object that is taken off a corpse, worn in ignorance, and dropped in a desert.

Why they turned red is the one piece of production history worth knowing, because it is a technology decision rather than a story one. The same Langley draft is credited with the change, and the reason was Technicolor: silver on screen is a grey smear, and MGM had an expensive new colour process to show off. The sequins had to be a deep enough red to keep from reading orange under the lights, which is why the surviving pairs look darker in person than they do in the film.

MGM made several pairs and the production records were destroyed, so nobody can say how many with confidence; somewhere between four and five are known to survive, one of them at the Smithsonian. A pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota in 2005 and recovered by the FBI in 2018. Baum's silver shoes, by contrast, are still lost in the desert, which is the more interesting ending of the two.

🎭 Two witches instead of four, and a girl with no age

The book has four witches, one per compass point: two wicked, in the East and West, and two good, in the North and South. The film merges the two good ones into a single character and gives her Glinda's name, which is why so many people are surprised to learn that the Glinda of the novel rules the South and does not appear until near the end.

Dorothy's age is the change nobody notices they have absorbed. The novel never gives a number. The only physical description is that she is a well-grown child for her age, and that the Munchkins are about her height. Everything readers think they know about how old she is comes from the screen, where the reason was casting rather than reading. Judy Garland was sixteen through most of the shoot and seventeen by release, playing a girl the production pitched at about twelve, and the costume department spent the film working to make her look younger. So the definitive Dorothy is a teenager dressed down to a child, standing in for a character the source text declines to date at all.

The Emerald City is the other quiet edit. In the film it is green because it is green. In the book it is green because everyone entering is fitted with locked green spectacles, and the Wizard admits it.

🎈 The book keeps going after the balloon

The film ends shortly after the Wizard's balloon leaves without her. The novel has seven chapters to run at that point, and they are among the strangest in it. Dorothy and her friends set out south to find Glinda, and on the way they are attacked by trees that throw them back onto the road, climb a wall into a country where every person, animal and building is made of painted china and stands no higher than her knee, and are stopped by a hillside of armless creatures who fire their own heads at intruders.

None of it is in the film, and it is easy to see why: it is picaresque rather than dramatic, four separate obstacles in a row with no rising action between them. But it is where the book does its last piece of work. The china country in particular is a small, sad joke about rescue. Dorothy wants to take a china princess home with her, and is told that away from her own country the princess would stiffen into an ornament on a mantelpiece and never move again.

Then Glinda distributes the ending. The Scarecrow goes back to rule the Emerald City, where the people are proud of being governed by a stuffed man. The Tin Woodman goes west to rule the Winkies, who asked for him. The Lion returns to a forest whose animals have already made him king. The film gives its three companions a hug and a moral. The book gives them countries.

Which is why the shoes are the right place to start playing. In the book, the moment they change hands is a bit of housekeeping after a death that nobody mourns, and neither the girl holding them nor the crowd watching has any idea what they are for.

The full 1900 text is free at Project Gutenberg, and every line quoted here is in it.